Teamie

A cloud-based collaborative learning platform that fits into your ecosystem

Teamie

Teamie is a Singapore based startup that builds Collaborative Learning Platform in cloud for Educational Institutes & Enterprises. Teamie has been steadily increasing its presence in Asia’s education and corporate enterprise market, serving institutions such as United World College of South East Asia (UWCSEA).

Teamie fills a gap in the Asian market for institutions seeking a local, more accessible option with local pricing. The platform’s social networking feel makes it familiar and easy to use for students. Even after winning numerous awards, they continue to strive and stand out in the competitive Asian market.

Background

To build a winning product, you need a winning team. The leadership at Teamie had this mantra adopted right since the beginning. In order to make sure that their product remains top notch they agreed upon using the continuous feedback model for an ongoing discussion between the individual contributors & managers. As the team size started to grow it was imperative that these processes were institutionalised.

Challenges With Performance Management

Teamie uses JIRA for Project Management. While they could efficiently track and monitor the status of a feature or a sprint or a release, they could not do the same with the performance of their team members.

The team at Teamie (nice rhyme!!) relied on spreadsheets to document & track employee performance for continuous improvement. As the count of feedback became northbound , managing the umpteen spreadsheets rendered itself tedious. More importantly it was becoming difficult to provide any cumulative trend/insights to their team members.

Based on how their continuous feedback evolved to include multiple stakeholders, spreadsheets turned out to be fairly low IQ & out of sync. Keeping track of feedback received from all the stakeholders was becoming a challenge. In the absence of a specialised tool, data was stored at different places and thus significant time was lost in extracting meaningful information.

In an age where annual performance reviews are almost defunct, they sought to provide feedback on a continuous basis. The management wanted a tool that could provide this option so that employees could know the feedback from stakeholders with detailed contextual information

UpRaise Adoption

UpRaise is an Agile Performance Management add-on. Natively developed for JIRA, it empowers teams to do Goal management, Continuous Feedback & Performance Reviews in JIRA.

Leadership at Teamie realized that reliance on multiple isolated systems can be a drain on anyone. Thus they ensured that Teamie provided a single platform required for learning management, social collaboration, analytics and student management so that teachers can focus on guiding and coaching students without any hassles.

What made Teamie take up UpRaise was that the unique proposition of UpRaise is in line with the Teamie’s fervor for continuous learning.

UpRaise’s belief that real-time & centralised feedback within JIRA would be tremendously useful for progressive teams echoed with Teamie’s philosophy. Expectation was that this would take away a lot of administrative overhead that was currently being invested by managers & team members.

Changes After UpRaise

Once the decision to adopt UpRaise for continuous was finalized, the team laid down certain guidelines-

For every story completed, feedback would be collected from different stakeholders such as Project manager, Product manager & Code reviewer. Further classification of feedback into different categories was facilitated by feedback labels in UpRaise. This ensured that irrespective of the numbers, data was well organised and easy to process

Managers should provide all the scrum team members with feedback at the end of every sprint, if not sooner

All this information would be collectively used at the end of every quarter to provide detailed feedback from 3 perspectives:

Quality delivery

Adherence to timeline

Adherence to specs

Benefits After Adopting UpRaise

UpRaise has not only fulfilled the initial assumption that administrative overhead would be reduced but also has brought in clarity to the feedback by combining it with JIRA tasks. Some of the key benefits included-

The management could now get more comprehensive information about team members across various sprints at specific time durations. They could easily compare past data and identify if there were any gaps from expectations.

Team members could proactively request their managers for feedback. It wasn’t always the manager who initiated feedback discussion. There was consistent interaction between team members and their managers which led to 33% increase in Employee Engagement.

Leadership figured that in the long run this can save at least 10 hrs/sprint when managed in UpRaise considering a sprint is of 2 weeks. They saw that a lot of time and money could be saved once they got rid of spreadsheets to document all feedback.

With regular exchange of ideas to reduce the gap between expected and actual performance levels, Teamie saw a 15% increase in productivity as compared to previous quarter/year

Teamie isn’t stopping at Continuous Feedback, they are starting to implement Goals management within UpRaise.